


i'm already bones and born again

by awindingstair



Category: Bloodborne (Video Game)
Genre: Friendship, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-06-02
Updated: 2017-06-02
Packaged: 2019-07-06 04:22:39
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 784
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15878451
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/awindingstair/pseuds/awindingstair
Summary: A vignette. Rom, and her memories of the time before the end.





	i'm already bones and born again

**Author's Note:**

> sorry i freaked out and deleted this. but here it is again.

At Byrgenwerth Rom used to wander down by the side of the lake. She didn’t have to go far before the trees of the not-yet-forbidden woods covered the sky and loomed heavy over their own shadows, before the brown earth became muddy and the air became wet. She’d let herself walk barefoot in the shallow muck then, knowing that no one was watching and no one cared.

More than once she even kneeled among the reeds and rocks and roots, dirtying her clothes when they sank in the mud. She breathed. She watched a spider skitter across the surface of the water. It reached the tip of a spindly root that had dug out a crevice in the ground, and darted underneath it. That was even before anyone really knew what was happening to her. She was beginning to empty. She was not yet vacant.

Micolash said, “I dream, sometimes.”

“Oh!” Rom looked up. “You startled me, Micolash. I was just thinking… Well, not about anything important.”

Micolash sat on a rocky outcropping, dangling his legs over the side and twisting his fingers in his hair. His waxy, pale face wore its usual expression of contrite befuddlement. “I think the air is cooler here than in Byrgenwerth,” he said, and then, “haha, no, that’s not what we meant to say.”

Micolash was always like that. He drifted vaguely from  _ I _ s to  _ we _ s as though he addressed a large audience at a formal event, or as though he was being shadowed by a hundred other Micolashes. Rom found it charming, if a bit confusing; she was certainly not one who could complain about the oddities of others.

“In my dreams, I hear the ocean, calling to me. We go to it, and we drink freely from it, and the water suffuses me until we are but a shell. And creatures swim through us, we see them in our ribs, we hear their voices louder than ever.”

“That’s very beautiful,” Rom sighed, picking a shred of grass from the ground and eating it.

“That’s not the point! It doesn’t matter if it’s beautiful. There’s something we’re not understanding, we’re sure of it. Something vital.” Micolash clenched his hands tighter on his scalp for a moment. “I’m sorry. I don’t mean to be rude. Ahh, but it itches at us, Rom.”

Rom looked at him, at his miserable scowl and furrowed brow, and felt a sympathetic pain begin in her temples. Poor Micolash. He was more fevered for knowledge than any other of the students of Byrgenwerth, though they were all of a kind. “Come and sit with me.”

“I am sitting.” But he jumped down off the rock and landed with a squelch. His legs were unsteady on the slick ground, and he laughed as he tottered forward, trying not to fall. Rom pushed herself up with her hands and caught his arms. “Aah,” he snickered, “your hands are all over mud!”

“It’s soothing,” Rom said officiously. “It will stop you from thinking too much.” She refrained from pressing her wet hands on the sides of his face, although she was dearly tempted.

“It must hardly need work to clear out your mind.”

Rom laughed, because he didn’t mean it cruelly; she trusted him to say such things as she might not trust another. She sank back down into the mud, and Micolash followed suit, although it took him longer to fold to the ground.

“It is colder,” she said. “The air, I mean.”

“Yes, and the grass here is different, too. Don't you agree, dear Rom?”

Rom did agree; it was saltier, for one. And other plants grew by the lake as well: thick reeds and scrawny bushes, and the occasional stand of milkweed.

“Mm,” she said. She dug her fingers into the dirt.

“Whatever are you thinking of?” Micolash asked in the diffident way he always asked her, knowing that she was disinclined to share her thoughts with anyone, even him.

Sometimes she curled herself on the soggy ground of the lakeside, letting stems brush her arms, and slept, and dreamt. She would dream of all manner of things, but the ones she could remember most easily were of a welcoming darkness and an unintelligible voice, whispering sweetly to her.

She liked it, here on the lake, but sometimes her joints ached. Sometimes her head felt huge and hot and full of dark water. She wished, sometimes, that she could refuse this gift. But how could she say that to him, to Micolash, who was full of longing she had never needed? She could never quite find the words—she had never had enough anyway.

"I dream too," she would say instead.


End file.
